This 360` photo was taken at &quot;last light&quot; whilst hovering over Brisbane CBD in a helicopter. It was a stunning night with 5 knots variable breeze. This was taken with one of my Canon 5DII with 24-105mm at 24mm in portrait format - 12 Images total. Shuter speed was 1/15th second ISO 1000. The panorama was stitched manually using Photoshop CS5. It took 10 hours to stitch. We do aerial photography all over Australia, with some assignments world wide, but by far my favourite aerial photography is night work.
NB: Some parts of the image have a little motion blur that is reall only noticable at or near 100%. I have also applied some noise reduction which has stolen a little detail, but a more pleasant overall feel.

Gigapan Comments
(6)

I recently rented a Nikon D3s to see if it would
give me an advantage for shooting aerial panoramas
at twilight. It does do better than other cameras,
but I do not think warrants the extra cost unless
you have a customer with sufficient budget to
cover it. The D700 or 5D Mark II would be good
enough without incurring the extra cost. Does the
pilot try and keep the wind on the nose of the
aircraft?

Hello, I just saw your helipano! superb. I tried
the same image on my city (60.000n inhabitants)
but it was at the same time and for the World Cup
soccer ago years.2 two errors: the population
watched television so few houses lit - shoot at 1
/ 100 and 12000 ASA.Donc lot of grain and
single-use Web-tourism Compliments your work is
very nice I also put long enough to assemble ... I
want to repeat the same image day with 10 views.
It's better and I could easily scale up to 2
meters Cordialement Me recommend you try Autopano
Pro is the reference since I am not used that
software. Once purchased designers work
continuously and are made of a day at regular
hours here is the link www.autopano.net/fr/solutions-asse
mblage-photo/autopano-pro.html ---------------------
gigapan.org/gigapans/52418/my
pano day gigapan.org/gigapans/52508/

I sat in the front for balance reasons, and just
kept my legs out of the way as much as possible.
The hardest thing about night photography from a
helicopter is the perfect light is only around for
a few minutes, but only about a minute before
official "last light" which means you
have to get out of there. All in all it was a very
fun job, and very rewarding.

Do you sit in front to communicate better with the
pilot? I prefer to sit in the back seat so that my
leg is not next to the stick. They did not give
you much time before sending you to a higher
elevation.